Logos and episteme
Wai Lok CHEUNG
ABSTRACT: Pritchard explains the putative failure of knowledge in the fake barn case using epistemic safety. I bring out the notion of epistemic luck, and interact epistemic competence with it through epistemic situation. I propose that evidence supervenes on epistemic situation, such that, given an epistemic success, the measure of epistemic luck of the corresponding epistemic act is degree 1.0 minus the degree of one’s epistemic competence. This provides a virtue-theoretic understanding of inductive inference, given that statistical intelligence constitutes an epistemic skill that is an element of epistemic competence. The upshot within virtue epistemology is the epistemic obligation to minimize epistemic luck through bettering one’s epistemic competence; from without, it seems epistemology, shall it need to explain inductive knowledge, cannot do without epistemic competence.
